Tau merely grinned at him and made a bye-bye wave.
“You’re fired!”
Dev shouted.
Tau checked his watch. “Twelve-fifteen,” he called back. “Possibly a record.”
Dev, muttering in amusement now, headed through the doorway and toward the elevator. A few moments later he was walking through the doors into Lola’s suite, annoyed that he had to disappoint her, and himself, by not having lunch with her. The annoyance was sharpened by the sound of her laughter coming out of the living area. But then the annoyance fell off somewhat as he saw someone in a three-piece suit sitting cross- legged on the floor with a picture book in his lap. It was Jim Margoulies.
“How the heck did you beat me up here?” Dev said, heading over to them. Lola was sitting on the opposite side of the low table, stuffing a frankfurter into her mouth—one of several that sat on the plate in front of her along with some dunking mustard—and grinning at her Uncle Jim.
Jim shrugged. “You were on the phone. I was getting ready to come over anyway when Tau told me to step on it, as you would probably have a problem in about two minutes. Oh, thanks, Pops—”
Poppy had come in and now handed Jim an iced coffee. Lola extracted half the hot dog from her mouth, waved it at Dev, and said, “Uncle Jim is reading me about Wuggie Norple!”
Dev grinned. It was Lola’s favorite book, one which at present she never stopped insisting she wanted read to her—with the result that Dev and Mirabel now both knew it by heart. Dev was more than relieved to let Jim handle the torture for the moment—assuming he knew what he was getting into. “That’s great,” Dev said. “Jim, you sure you have time for the literary life right now?”
“Yes I do,” Jim said, “and right now
you
should go take care of what you have to before you start getting stressed.”
“’Start?’ ” Dev said. But he smiled at his friend and got down by Lola. “Got a hug for Daddy, Lolo?”
She stuffed the hot dog back in her face and put her arms up. Dev smooched her, participated enthusiastically in the rather mustardy hug, and said in her ear, “You know what Mommy said?”
“What?”
“If you’re a good girl, she’s gonna take you to Coldstone later.”
Lola emitted a shriek of joy that was deafening at this range, not that Dev minded. She disentangled herself from Dev and turned to Jim with utmost seriousness. “Unca Jim,” she said, “can you come to Coldstone? I’ll buy you an ice cream.”
“Hmm,” Jim said. “Well, we should consider the financial side of this carefully before we make any overt moves.”
Lolo put down her hot dog, jumped up, and vanished into her bedroom. A few moments later she emerged carrying her piggy bank, a fat pink earthenware business with a pronounced smirk, which had been a gift from Jim.
Dev gave Jim an amused look. “I’m going to leave you fiduciary wizards to sort this out among yourselves,” he said. “If you need me, I’ll be O-side.”
“I’ll catch up with you later,” Jim said.
Dev headed out past Poppy, who was standing in the doorway looking on with amusement at the energetic shaking and jingling now underway. “I’ve gotta cure her of this impulse buying,” Dev said.
Poppy chuckled. “No impulse about it, Daddy Dev,” she said. “She’s been plotting this assault on the marketplace ever since you mentioned Jim this morning.”
Dev shook his head, smiling, as he headed out. “When her mom turns up,” he said, “tell her I’m online, okay? Got some things to see to.”
“Will do, Dev.”
He left Lola’s suite and headed down to the far end of the family wing proper. Dev had offices all over the campus, in every major “village of the like-minded,” but his main one took up about a third of the north side of Castle Dev. There three floors of the north wing had been interconnected with spiral stairs and old European- style open passenger lifts. The doors at the end of the family wing opened on the third- floor executive office, the most comfort-oriented one, which was more like a giant living room than anything else, and child-proofed. Couches and comfy furniture were scattered around the big central desk, most of the walls were lined with railed bookshelves, and all the windows looked inward. The outer windows on this level were replaced by a FullWall macroplasma screen for teleconferencing and other purposes. Right now it was showing an image that was one of an endlessly changing set of webcam views—in this case, some Mediterranean city he couldn’t identify offhand. “Household management,” he said as he opened the door of the glass- enclosed niche for the paternoster lift and waited for the downward-moving step to reach floor level.
“Yes, Dev?”
“What’s that on the wallscreen right now?”
“A view of Split Harbor,” said the management computer.
“Thank you. Boot up the second floor online suite, please?”
“Booting now.”
Dev stepped onto the lift step as it came level, keeping an eye on the niche’s glass door to make doubly sure it closed and locked properly behind him, as Lola sometimes came in here with one or another of her PAs.
City security,
he thought as the lock snicked home.
Manpower isn’t going to solve it. I wonder
. . . But there were other concerns right now. Item three on that list kept coming back to haunt him, and the Conscientious Objector routines, which he was sure were somehow at the bottom of that particular malfunction.
Well, we’ll see what Tau and I can brainstorm later. Meanwhile . . .
He stepped off the lift on the second floor. Here was the place where Dev got most of his daytime work done: another neutrally-furnished place like the tower meeting room, but this one featuring several huge desks—one of which was Frank’s, though Frank also had numerous offices and cubbies scattered around the campus linked together by teleconferencing and online-access facilities. Various solid filing facilities, more bookshelves, and another smaller FullWall alternated with both outside and inside windows on this level. Off in the northeast corner sat a black glass cube twenty feet on a side.
Dev headed for it, and the access cube’s sensors, checking his biometrics, cleared the glass and swung the cube door open for him. Inside was a big comfortable zero-G chair, its intuitive gel cushions and built-in counterbalance functions meant to keep a heavy online user’s body from feeling the strain of all that sitting-still time. Dev sat down, reached into the chair pocket, and pulled out the RealFeel interface. “Close up,” he said to the cubicle, “and go dark. Interior lighting on low. Frank?”
The household management computer said, “Finding him.” A moment later came the soft
burr-burr
of an on-campus phone ring.
“Yeah, Boss?”
“I’m in the second-story cube,” he said. “Need to have a quick look around at some things online. I should be done in an hour or so. Are we clear?”
“No problems at all, Boss,” Frank’s voice said. “Except for the one you’re gonna have with certain parties if you’re not seen to eat something pretty soon.”
Dev smiled wryly. “Tell her what happened to my lunch hour.”
“I’ll tell her,” Frank said, “but don’t think it’s gonna spare you what you’ve got coming. Just go over to the cantina when you’re done and eat a sandwich, will you?”
“Yes, Mommy! Bye-bye.”
The connection went quiet: from long analysis of his voice patterns, the household management computer knew when Dev was done with a call. He sighed, slipped on the RealFeel headset, got the eyecups in place, and looked into the darkness.
There was the usual faint flash as the headset’s hardware got into sync with his optic nerve and engineered the necessary connections. A second later Dev was sitting in his online workspace, which was a twin of the second floor office—with certain differences.
He got up out of the chair. The glass of the cubicle cleared around him, and the door opened. Dev headed out into the office, making for the central desk. What in the physical world had looked like a huge and fairly tidy expanse of ebony, featuring only some paperwork awaiting signing and some bric-a-brac surrounding a small brass cannon, was here a huge black glass slab around which hung hundreds of vertical sheets of light. Most of them were pale almost to the point of transparency, some of them brighter and more visible, a few of them opaque and glowing; in one case, the glow was throbbing brighter and dimmer, brighter and dimmer, like something that urgently needed to be looked at. Beyond the desks and the documents there were no walls: the view stretched straight out over the streets and rooftops of Omnitopia City. The floor was glass nearly as black as the desk, and through it, away down a couple of hundred feet or so, could faintly be seen the upper surfaces of the lintel stones of the Ring of Elich. Farther down, Dev could see the plaza around the Ring, busy with players as always. He paused to study it for a moment. If there was any vista in Omnitopia that Dev knew how to read, it was this one; and to his eye it looked a lot more agitated than usual.
Well, they’ll calm down,
he thought.
But meanwhile—
Dev went over to the most brightly throbbing document, reached out, and tweaked its lower corner. The doc expanded to a sheet a couple of feet long by a foot: it was Frank’s initial written debrief about the streaming attack on the plaza, now with a couple of attachments. One of them was a complete census of players involved in it as attackers, victims, or other participants; another was an initial analysis and list of suggestions from the infrastructure management people. Dev flicked the surface of the document a couple of times with a forefinger to make it scroll up as he looked over the suggestions. He thought about them for a moment, then scrolled back up to the top again and poked one of the names on the document’s cc list. “Randy?” he said.
A window popped open on the document. In it there appeared the webcammed image of Randy DeNovra, the chunky dark young senior manager in infrastructure management. He was sitting in front of his monitor and typing something by hand, yet another of a series of endearingly retro office habits. “Hey, Mr. Dev—”
“I’ve just been through your recommendations. Thanks for getting those in so quickly.”
“Like I wouldn’t have done it even if I’d had a choice,” Randy said, “which I did not. Majella’s been running around screaming at the top of her lungs for the last hour about being terrified of some kind of copycatting attack. And it could happen, so the sooner we have some kind of measure in place, the better.”
Dev listened. “Don’t seem to hear any screaming now.”
“Her PA made her go have a latte,” said Randy. “When she comes back, she can claim it was her blood sugar talking.”
Dev smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Just quickly: suggestion one sucks, so don’t do that. Suggestion two sounds kind of okay, but let me think about it for a while, and if I haven’t come up with something useful in the next twenty- four hours, go ahead and do what you’re planning. Suggestion three—How much manpower are you intending to spend on this particular solution?”
“About a hundred people,” Randy said, “scattered around the various time zones, until we get the new code in place that will sniff out this kind of attack anyplace in Telekil, not just the City. We’ve got a lot of volunteers already, people who’re willing to retask their personal-project time. They’ll screen large-scale player movements in real time, assessing the weapons and other assets that the players are carrying, and assigning live assets from proctoring to keep an eye on anything that looks weird.”
“How long for the code?”
“A week and a half, I think. Might be two. We’ve got a lot of interleaving to do with the basic Ring routines; you don’t want it mistakenly outlawing legal movements of large groups.”
Dev thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Don’t try to cover more than half of your personnel assignments with PP time, though. I’ll have personnel authorize double time for those who’re interested. Spread the word around in the assignments infranet and see who picks you up.”
“Probably a lot of people, Mr. Dev. People feel protective about the City. A lot of folks are in shock.”
Dev’s grin went a bit sour. “They’re not alone,” he said. “Anything else we need?”
“Not unless you have more notes on our notes.”
“Okay, then we’re done,” Dev said. “Thanks, Randy. Tell Majella I said to calm down, she’s doing a great job.”
“Will do.”
The window closed. Dev sighed, looked over the document one more time, and tweaked it again to take the throb out of its glow. He was about to turn away from it when he remembered to ask the usual question. “Any correlations between this and other pending material?”
One of the attachments to the document he was still holding started to throb. It was the census list. The other was some feet away, closer to the desk. When Dev beckoned it closer, he found that it was Ron Ruis’ Microcosm status report for that morning.
“Huh,” Dev said, enlarging that document and scrolling down it to find a name that also appeared in the census list. “Really . . . ?”
He poked the name. “Sticky that for me,” he said. “Tag the sticky as ‘investigate.’ Meantime, show me the rack, please.”
At the other end of the office, away past the festoons of documents hanging around the central desk, a wrist-thick horizontal beam of white light appeared. From it hung many shadowy forms which, as Dev made his way over to them, resolved into what at first glimpse could have been taken for bodies. Male and female, human and non-human, monstrous and ordinary, they were all shapes that Dev had invented for himself, or which his staff had invented for him, so that he could walk his worlds undetected and get a sense of what was really going on in there.
He stood there irresolute for a moment, then waved the rack along a little. The shapes fled out of sight to be replaced by new ones. “No,” Dev said. “No, no, no . . .” The display changed again, then again. Finally Dev’s eyes lit on one seeming that he hadn’t seen before. “What the—”